Hootsuite Taps Software Veteran to Lead Enterprise Sales

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Hootsuite is adding Bob Elliott, a software industry sales veteran of 20 years, to the upper echelons of its talent bench.

Elliott, hired as SVP of global sales for Hootsuite, has been tasked with expanding global sales of its enterprise platform. Elliott joins the company having held various sales positions in SAP, Ariba, i2, JD Edwards and Sybase throughout his career.

The appointment comes less than a month after Hootsuite named Penny Wilson its first chief marketing officer.

A Tenure with SAP

He was managing director at SAP Canada from May 2013 through September of this year, after having been promoted from SVP of sales at the company, which he joined in 2007 as a VP. While at SAP Canada, Elliott led a team of five hundred people and helped bring home some $1 billion of revenue.

At i2 he was SVP of Global Partners and Alliances, building out the company’s partnership network partner team.

Before that he held sales roles at a number of older-school tech companies, most of which have been absorbed into larger portfolio holdings by the big ERP vendors.

He was VP of sales at Sybase, now a standalone subsidiary of SAP. He was VP of sales at TempoSoft, a workforce management applications acquired by Oracle.

He was director of sales at Ariba, one of the largest procurement software applications back in the day, which was eventually acquired by SAP as well. For five years, at the start of his career, he was director of sales at JD Edwards, another Oracle acquisition.

With this background, it is safe to say Elliott understand the enterprise mindset on both the buy and the sell side.

He is joining other recently recruited executives at Hootsuite: Sujeet Kini is the new chief financial officer and Penny Wilson just began at the company as its first chief marketing officer.

Kini and Wilson come to Hootsuite with strong creds as well: Kini was the chief accounting officer of Open Text, Canada's largest publicly traded software company. Wilson’s background included Juniper Networks and Macromedia, which Adobe acquired for $3.4 billion in 2005.

This is the team that will Hootsuite break further into the enterprise class.

Hootsuite Aims for Enterprise Users

Hootsuite, which launched as a freemium application for individuals in 2008, has spread into the enterprise as the company started adding features relevant to their needs.

Today the company counts 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies among its ten million users.

Beyond that, Hootsuite tends to keep details about its enterprise customer base close. Here and there, however, in announcements and Securities and Exchange filings by US companies that either use the application or partner with it, there are signs that the enterprise version of this social media management platform is making inroads with larger companies.

Earlier this year, for example, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Proofpoint, which provides security and compliance software, announced that it and Hootsuite, its partner in social media management and security, experienced more than 300 percent growth in joint customers.

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